


Ignorance Is

by local_doom_void



Series: Triumph [3]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, POV Outsider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-07
Updated: 2020-05-07
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:27:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24048934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/local_doom_void/pseuds/local_doom_void
Summary: Dudley Dursley will never know the meaning ofVoldemort.
Series: Triumph [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1734892
Comments: 4
Kudos: 94





	Ignorance Is

**Author's Note:**

> Wow it's another oneshot...Funny that.

Dudley Dursley is eleven, and Daddy is going mad.

That might be fine, though. The rest of the world is going mad, too, and not in an amusing way. The letters were funny until they became a mass of parchment drowning the living room, papercuts thrown from their edges without care. The competition between Harry and Daddy, each trying to get to the letters first, was funny until Daddy pushed Harry so hard that Harry hit his head on the wall and left a faint red splotch there.

Dudley stares at that red splotch, and it’s perhaps the first time that doubt ever creeps in.

But then they are driving in a car for hours and hours, and he doesn’t have any of his toys, and they won’t stop, and he forgets all about that one moment of doubt. He hates those stupid letters. How could they be so terrible?

It becomes the anxiety of a child confronted by something that even his parents are terrified of and unnerved by. His parents who make everything unpleasant go away are scared, and for once, they cannot fix this problem.

It’s a very terrible loss of control for an eleven year old.

So when a massive, bearded man crashes through a door, Dudley sees a monster. When the bearded man destroys a gun with his bare hands, Dudley’s eyes widen, because not even his video game heroes can do that. When the bearded man threatens Daddy with an umbrella and lights a fire without touching the fireplace at all, Dudley –

Thinks very, very hard, and notices the m-word for the first time.

_Magic._

Magic isn’t real. Mummy and Daddy are very clear about this fact.

Magic isn’t real, but the giant man bent a gun with his hands and lit a fire from an umbrella, and letters just don’t come out of a fireplace like that, in a tidal wave so big and with such force it knocks you off your feet. Magic isn’t real, but there’s a pig tail sticking out of Dudley’s bum and it hurts when he pulls on it, as if it’s a part of him. Magic isn’t real, but in the morning, Harry and the giant man are gone, and the boat is gone, and an old man with a long beard is standing on the rock outside humming to himself and tapping his foot, wearing a dress covered in stars that actually spin.

Magic isn’t real, but it is, and Mummy and Daddy knew that it was real.

Dudley is not allowed to go anywhere near the old man in the dress. He doesn’t even mind that. Normally he might want to tug on the man’s dress and stare at the stars, but there’s still a pig tail on his bum and he is beginning to recognise that none of these people make any sense at all.

Mummy talks with the man, stiff and stern. The man talks back to her. They get their boat back. They go back to the shore. Dudley is taken to a hospital and the pig tail gets chopped off. (He still has a scar there, at the very lowest point of his back.)

Harry comes back at the end of the day, wild and strange, carrying books that look handwritten, a case full of weird and gross animal parts, a telescope, and a cage with a real owl inside of it. Harry stays in Dudley’s old bedroom for the rest of the summer and never really comes out. 

Dudley’s glad. He doesn’t want to see Harry, who is one of _them_ – one of those dangerous, terrible people.

He begs Mummy to make Harry go away forever once Harry vanishes to his school. But he’s told this cannot happen – he is told this is impossible. He goes to Smeltings and hits as many smaller boys as he can with his Smeltings stick, because magic is real and he does not know where it is not.

  


Harry comes back the next summer after Dudley does. Apparently magic school goes very long.

But Harry comes back from magic school and does not eat. He wakes Dudley up by thumping on the floor a few times when he falls out of bed. Dudley tests the boundaries of how dangerous Harry may or may not be now and finds that they are still too worrying to really be tested.

_Something_ ruins dinner with the Masons. Daddy thinks it’s Harry. Dudley thinks privately to himself that Harry was probably involved. But Dudley saw something else in the kitchen too – something that definitely was not Harry, because even Harry had never been that thin and knobbly, and had never ever had eyes so wide or ears so big. Harry had never been that pale.

He doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t have to think about it anymore when Daddy locks Harry in his room, and that’s fine, even when a car floats outside Harry’s window and then flies away with Harry in it.

Dudley isn’t paying attention and is glad he’s gone. He hopes Harry doesn’t come back.

  


Harry comes back the next summer anyway, and now he jumps at strange noises that people shouldn’t jump at. He flinches away from the sink when it runs in the background, away from the AC when it hisses. He has a new scar on his upper right arm that Dudley’s never seen before, an ugly, twisted node of tissue. He jumps at weird shadows in the evening and keeps his back to the wall more often than Dudley remembers him being. He still does not eat – still wakes Dudley up when he falls out of his bed and thuds onto the floor.

Once, at night, Dudley gets up to get water and hears Harry through the thin doorway. He stands stock-still just outside, waiting, but nobody is in there with Harry – or if somebody is in there with Harry, it’s not anyone Dudley knows.

“Tom, no – no – don’t – leave her alone...”

That voice is muffled by sleep, and maybe by a pillow. Dudley creeps back to his bed without getting water, because he doesn’t like thinking about the desperate tone of voice that Harry uses during his dreams.

It is this desperation, and the bags under Harry’s eyes, that makes Dudley nervous when Aunt Marge visits. Dudly doesn’t act like he’s nervous, of course – he pretends he isn’t nervous at all. But deep inside he remembers that magic exists, and he wonders…

He was right to wonder.

At least Harry is gone earlier this year.

  


Dudley returns home with a sullen mood and a number of strongly worded letters from the Smeltings nurse to his mum and dad. He is greeted in the morning by grapefruits and rabbit food salads, and he feels like he’s dying and uncomfortable, in his own home, even without Harry here.

Harry returns home with an equally sullen mood, and stays in his bedroom as much as possible. Dudley does not creep by Harry’s room at night anymore, worried of what he could hear. He does notice the viciousness with which Harry tugs up weeds in the garden, and he recognises these actions as frustration.

It is almost normal. Therefore, the universe conspires to remind Dudley that this is not normal, and that Harry, too, is not and will never be normal. So on one otherwise nice Wednesday in July, the entire fireplace gets blasted across the living room without warning. Soot and ashes get everywhere, the house is full of strange and unnerving red-headed people whose clothes do not look normal, and Harry knows all of them.

Dudley is standing back, because he still has a scar at the base of his spine and he remembers that magic is dangerous and undesirable. But because he is standing back, he sees a toffee rolling out from under the coffee table, and he just assumes –

He doesn’t really assume anything, to be fair. He just knows that he hasn’t had sugar in so long, and he wants that toffee. Just one won’t hurt, after all.

But just one does hurt.

  


Even though his tongue is fixed, and even though that incident happened ages ago, Dudley does not forget. He doesn’t forgive, either. Mom and Dad might not be able to make Harry go away forever – even though he _should_ go away – and they might not be able to do anything about the magic people, either. Dudley can’t do anything about all the magic people, either, and he isn’t stupid enough to think he can. He doesn’t know where they live, after all.

But he can do something about Harry. He can show Harry who is boss. And so…

“What’s wrong with you?” Dudley challenges him one day in the garden.

Harry stops what he’s doing and stares up, up at Dudley from over the frames of his glasses. His face is set in a glower. The bags under his eyes are even deeper than they were that second summer, and in contrast against the rest of his face, they make his green eyes even brighter.

“What?” he snaps in voice, and Dudley snaps in temper.

“What’s bloody wrong with you?” Dudley says. “You’ve been weird ever since you came back this time. You jump at everything and you creep around and hide under the window all the time, I saw you – ”

“Well excuse me for worrying about Voldemort!” Harry spits nonsensically. He hops upright and gets into Dudley’s face, all scrawny and smaller than Dudley in every way, yet still somehow furious looking enough that Dudley takes the slightest step back. “He’s back, you know! Voldemort is back! You try not jumping at things now, huh, Big D?”

“What the bloody hell’s a Voldemort?” Dudley asks, screwing up his face in confusion.

Harry doesn’t tell him. Instead, he whirls and stalks away, garden half-weeded. Dudley watches him go, and shrugs to himself.

It’s not his problem.

Or, it shouldn’t be his problem. But Harry’s dreams are back, and so are Harry’s midnight, pillow-muffled babblings. Dudley’s still on his stupid diet, and he sometimes lies awake at night, being hungry and miserable and hot in the summer heat. As he lies there he hears Harry’s dreams, and what he hears is –

“no, no, drown, please, drown…”

“Cedric, Cedric, _no_ – ”

“Mum, help, he’s gonna kill me…”

He tries not to think about it.

Then they almost die, and Dudley really, desperately, can’t ignore it anymore.

But Harry’s gone – Harry probably won’t come back all year, until next summer. His parents are blissfully happy, as they always are, but Dudley feels as though he’s been drained of all ability to feel the relief that they feel. He can’t be happy that Harry is gone when he has questions that need answers that only Harry can provide. Who is ‘he’? Who is Cedric? What is drowning? Why was Harry talking to his mum, when Harry’s mum is dead?

Who, or what, is – Voldemort? Is that right?

Mum and Dad wouldn’t know, and Dudley doesn’t try to ask them anyway. That won’t end well, he knows. He tries to look it up in the library, both at home and at school, but he doesn’t find anything, so instead, he has to sit on the question for an entire year.

For once, he can’t wait for Harry to get home. So when he hears the sound of the front door opening unexpectedly one night while Mum and Dad are out on the back patio, Dudley goes curiously to see what’s going on. Harry isn’t due back for a few more days, but Dudley can’t think of who else would have a key to get it – or who else would have that much audacity, to try and open the door without permission or being a family member.

It isn’t Harry.

It’s a man. He’s one of _them_ , though. Dudley can tell this from his clothes, draped over him in patterns that fit a fantasy novel and not the real world, from the dark blackness of them and the pattern of the cloth. There’s a hood on his head, so vast and low-hanging that Dudley doesn’t even know how he can see out of it, and he is _tall_.

Dudley moves to ask him just what he thinks he’s doing here. Then he plans to run for it, or at least get out of line of sight, if he seems at all dangerous. If anything, he’ll be confused by the ‘muggle’ things around him, and that gives Dudley an advantage.

He thinks this. He makes this plan.

But the man moves before he can. Tilts his head to one side, then the other, and then reaches up with a black gloved hand to draw the hood away. Underneath he looks oddly normal for one of them – at least he does for a second, pale skin and dark, wavy hair and all.

Then Dudley notices his eyes, and that they’re red.

Humans don’t have red eyes. They _don’t_.

Dudley takes a step and turns to bolt. Turning to bolt doesn’t work, though. He takes that step back, and then cannot move any more. A cold pressure grips him like a vise, and no matter how much he tries, his muscles do nothing that he tells them to do.

“Tell me,” the man is saying. His voice is rich and rolling, and yet freezing cold. Dudley yanks on himself harder, panicking, but he can’t move. Did he see the man’s hand curl into a fist? Is he doing this?! “Does Harry Potter live here?”

That’s enough of a non-sequitor to strike Dudley willingly still.

“Harry?” he repeats dully. “What about him? What do you want? He’s not here, he’s at that stupid school!”

But this doesn’t make the man leave. Instead, a terrifying smile splits his face. At least, it’s shaped like a smile, upturned mouth and bared teeth. His red, red eyes even glitter, but that glittering isn’t the usual light of a happy smile. The teeth usually aren’t bared that much, either.

“Lovely,” he says. His voice is like a gently rolling ocean, deceptively calm and pretty on the surface while it hides something terrifying and deep beneath. Quicker than Dudley’s eye can follow he whips something long, thin, and pale from his sleeve, and Dudley’s mouth is gone and his body is even more frozen. He topples gracelessly to the floor of the hallway, and though he tries to scream, only muffled noises come out.

Terrified now, Dudley watches as the man proceeds down the hallway. The way he moves isn’t normal, either. It’s smooth and unnerving, more fluid than a person ought to be. If he moves it is to some purpose – otherwise, he is still. He reminds Dudley of predators in nature documentaries, and he frantically tries to squirm once more.

“Duddykins?” Mum’s voice calls. “What was that noise?”

There’s a strange hissing sound in the air. It’s not coming from Dudley, but the teen can’t pinpoint it, either. It must be magic – it sounds like a snake, but there can’t be a snake that big here.

The man suddenly stalks, quickly, to the back of the house. Dudley still cannot move, and he strains to escape as he listens helplessly to Mum and Dad yelling in panic and being quickly cut off. He hears the tap of footsteps, too heavy to be Mum but far too light to be Dad. In the living room two thuds. Muffled noises as if somebody were trying to scream, or talk, or yell, but can’t.

The snake’s back. Dudley stares around as best he can, but still sees nobody. When he finally looks back, the man has come around the other way and stands at the foot of the hallway. He moves the thin, white rod – wand, it’s a wand, Dudley reminds himself – and suddenly, Dudley is floating in the air.

“It occurs to me you might enjoy the show,” the man says. His words are pretending to be kind, but his smile is nothing of the sort.

Mum and Dad are on the floor in the center of the living room. Dudley gets dropped on the couch, and the man paces around the rug, methodically pushing furniture as flush against the wall as it can get. The second armchair, Dudley’s favorite ever since he was a child, vanishes into literally nothing when the man looks sideways at it.

He doesn’t dare look at Mum or Dad. He thinks they might be struggling, too, but – it’s magic.

_Magic._

“Very well,” hums the man, coming to a halt. He raises both his arms, and his wand, as if he’s some perverse orchestral conductor. The sleeves of his clothing are long and bell-shaped, and they drape across his arms and sway to his movements as if they are the instruments.

Dudley wishes with despair that he’d tried harder to ask Harry who, or what, Voldemort was.

“Let’s begin, shall we?”

**Author's Note:**

> Please note that this is a oneshot and will not have any continuation. :) 
> 
> I've added a series to contain these little buggers where Voldemort sees unexpected victories he didn't see in the original books. There may be more oneshots as I come up with them.


End file.
